


alone on a hill

by cheloniidae



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen, Vault 21 Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:28:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25811371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: Doc Mitchell has seen Isaac Levitt twice since they left Vault 21. He didn't think the third time would be on his operating table.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	alone on a hill

Doc Mitchell’s mystery patient is alive, which is more than most men can say after taking two bullets to the head. It was midnight when Victor showed up on Mitchell’s doorstep with what looked like a dirty, dripping bundle of cloth; it’s long past daybreak, getting on to noon, when he cuts the last bandage. The man’s face is a mess of sutures and swollen tissue under the gauze, but Mitchell can tell he ain’t one of the townsfolk. Goodsprings is already in enough trouble from helping one outsider. If this one don’t bring a pack of Powder Gangers or worse down on the town’s head, it’ll be better luck than they’ve had so far.

Michell sinks into the nearest chair. Age piles up in the Mojave quicker than sand, and it buries folks just as fast. The wave of adrenaline that carried him through the surgery is gone. His fingers are paying for hours of extracting bone and bullet fragments, his bum leg ain’t happy about being stood on for so long, and his stomach is reminding him he hasn’t eaten since yesterday. The ceiling fan spins lazily overhead, circles and circles and circles.

Sleep tugs at him, and he stands before it can drag him under. Rest ain’t in his near future. The hours after an operation are the most critical; with no monitors to keep an eye on his patient’s vital signs, the responsibility falls to him. He changes out of his bloody clothes, sets a wind-up kitchen timer for ten minutes, and throws together something to eat. He’s no use to his patient if he faints from hunger.

The timer dings. Mitchell checks pulse, breathing, blood pressure. All still stable. Would be better if he had something to detect brain activity, but that kind of equipment don’t exist out here. Even his surgical lights aren’t really surgical lights, just something a prospector rigged together from old parts as a thank-you for saving her leg from an infected gecko bite.

When he’s done, he sets the timer again. He’ll be keeping this up for hours.

The man had a pack on him when Victor brought him in. It’s the only way to find a name and a next-of-kin to contact, but Mitchell still feels a pang of guilt as he rifles through its contents. In Vault 21, going through somebody else’s things like this was worse than hiding an ace up your sleeve. Life in close quarters with two hundred and ninety-nine other people made privacy a rare thing, which meant that wherever privacy could be found, it was sacrosanct. Inviolable. Mitchell does his best not to notice anything more than necessary, but he can’t help making observations. Whoever shot this John Doe left him his stimpaks and caps and books— lots of books. If this was a robbery like Victor said, the robber was after something less ordinary.

More digging through the inner pockets turns up an old photo wrapped in clear plastic. Mitchell recognizes the place before the people: a Vault 21 diner. There was a time he could’ve told which floor it belonged to just by the tiling, and a sour feeling twists his stomach when he realizes he can’t anymore. It’s a pointless question anyway, he reckons. Has to be Level One. Can’t be anything else, considering House flooded the lower two levels with concrete.

In the foreground, two men stand shoulder to shoulder, arms wrapped around each other. The man on the right is holding a young boy in his free arm. The kid beams at the camera, showing off the gaps in his baby-tooth smile. They’re all wearing vault suits.

Mitchell nearly loses the little food he’s had to eat today. These are no tourists playing dress-up. On their own, changed by years on the surface, he might not recognize them. Together, he recognizes the Levitt-Lucases.

He tries to put the name Isaac Levitt to the bloodied mess he fixed up last night. It takes a few tries before it sticks. The wasteland changes people, he knows that, but Mitchell never imagined Isaac any different from how he was in the vault: a mild-mannered schoolteacher who could outbluff a statue and knew too much about the history of Blackjack. He helped Mitchell pack his medical equipment they day House forced them out. And somebody tied him up, gagged him, shot him twice in the head, and buried him in a shallow grave half a mile outside town.

Mitchell buried his wife in that same graveyard. When the people of Vault 21 emerged from their home, they entered a wasteland full of new germs their bodies had never learned how to beat. Vance wasn’t the first to die from sickness. Even Isaac’s son — little Asher Levitt-Lucas, smiling so brightly in the photograph in Mitchell’s shaking hands — wasn’t spared. Of the three hundred and five people who left the vault, Mitchell knows at least two hundred and three are dead. The rest, he's tried not to find out.

The wasteland's taken too many of his people. It won't take another without a fight.

* * *

Alice and Lorena Dawsey are the first to show up to help. Word has already gotten out about the commotion in the graveyard. Turns out the robbers stopped for a few rounds of drinks at the saloon before heading out; Alice passes on Trudy’s description of them, and it matches Victor’s. “Not Gangers,” confirms Alice, which is the only good news.

Mitchell has the Dawseys move Isaac from the surgical table to the bed. He can’t do it on his own without breaking something in himself, in Isaac, or both, but the Dawseys wrangle bighorners for a living. One man ain’t a challenge for them. (Isaac is lighter than he should be, besides. Mitchell is gonna have to figure out how to feed him if he don’t wake up soon.)

“Know who he is?” Lorena asks, pensively chewing at her lip. This is a small, quiet town, and they like it that way. A near-murdered stranger is rarely a good omen.

“Isaac Levitt. He won’t be no trouble. I’ve known him since we was kids.”

“Christ!” says Alice. “Why didn’t you say nothing?”

“A friend of yours is a friend of ours,” says Lorena.

Gossip travels faster than bullets in Goodsprings. The Dawseys get it in their heads to bring a casserole by later, and other well-wishers follow suit. The townsfolk did the same when Vance got sick. That moment, that feeling of being part of something again, tied Mitchell to Goodsprings as much as her grave. “I hope your friend Isaac likes gecko,” says Sunny. That’s how all the townsfolk refer to Isaac, like it’s part of his name. A title. Doc Mitchell’s Friend Isaac.

Friend is the wrong word. By vault standards, they were just acquaintances; by surface standards, they’re something more intimate than family. But Mitchell doesn’t correct them. There’s a reason he keeps his Pip-Boy on a shelf, and it’s the same reason he took to talking like the townsfolk even though he never said ain’t a day in his life before he was forty-one. He’s part of Goodsprings now, as much as he can be. He don’t like reminding folks he was something else before.

* * *

The signs are not promising. Mitchell knows how these things go: the first twenty-four hours are the most critical, and every hour Isaac stays unconscious after that lowers his odds of waking up at all. Any gambler with chips on Isaac would be hedging their bet right about now.

Mitchell trades his own bed for a chair by Isaac’s bedside. Isaac will be disoriented if he wakes up; he’ll need somebody to help him get his bearings, keep him from standing and ripping out his IVs. Or worse, stumbling out of bed, falling, and hitting his head. His brain took two bullets. Doubtful it can take much more punishment.

Most of the day is spent in that same chair, telling Isaac stories. “Hey there, Yitz,” he says. “Remember when—” And he’ll launch into a story he hasn’t thought about in years. The party after the '67 Blackjack Tournament that took three days to clean up, or the time one of Isaac's students broke a wrist trying to break into his office through the air vents, or the time Level Two's rep lost his floor a day's worth of water rations on a bad poker hand. A familiar voice and familiar words are good for a recovering brain. For Isaac’s sake, Mitchell tries to remember what he used to sound like back when he wore a white coat over a vault suit. He smooths out his learned twang as much as he can, but the ain’ts and double-negatives still slip in. He can’t will away four years of habit overnight.

The town don’t stop on account of one man, and it isn't long before Mitchell has to start seeing other patients again. Most ways of getting hurt in the wasteland don’t have anything to do with other folks: animals, viruses, bacteria, thirst, malnutrition. Everywhere Mitchell’s been on the surface, he’s run into troublemakers, but nature’s tougher and it’s been there longer. Don’t need folks killing other folks when the wasteland’s happy to do it for them. He treats his patients in the clinic as usual, with a screen to shield Isaac from curious eyes. They still ask about him. “Might be a while ‘fore he wakes up,” is all Mitchell can say, and they pat him on the shoulder and promise him their prayers.

(Vault 21 had a saying: _Gamblers pray, and the Lady laughs._ No amount of pleading can turn snake eyes into double sixes, but the townsfolk mean it as a kindness, and Mitchell takes it as such.)

Another day passes.

The signs are not promising.

* * *

On the fourth morning after the surgery, Mitchell is woken by the sound of shifting sheets. He opens his eyes to find that Isaac’s are open, too. He’s half sitting, trying to prop himself up with his elbow, and he’s looking around the room in dazed confusion.

Mitchell gives silent thanks to the Lady. “Whoa, easy, easy,” he says. “Just stay there, Yitz. You’re all right. You’re all right.”

The nickname soothes Isaac, and he lets himself be lowered back onto the bed. “Mitch,” he says, his voice rasping like sandpaper. The IV fluids have kept him hydrated, but no water has touched his throat in at least four days. “Mitchell Weintraub? Is it really you?”

“It's me. Just relax a second. Here, have some water.” Mitchell takes the glass of water he’s been keeping by the bedside, raises Isaac’s head, and puts the glass to his lips. “Take it slow,” he warns. It would be better if he had ice chips, but he’d need a working freezer for that. He takes the glass away after a few sips.

“Thanks,” says Isaac. “That fever must have been something. You won't believe the dream I had. It felt so real. Robert House stole our vault, and... Where's Asher? Can I see him?”

Mitchell's heart sinks. “Yitz,” he says, gently. “Look out the window.”

Afternoon sunlight filters through the half-boarded-up window. Real sunlight, surface sunlight, unmistakeable for anything else. The one thing you'd never find in any vault. Minutes pass before Isaac speaks again. “Where are we?”

“My house in Goodsprings. I'm the town doctor here.”

“I thought you were going to California.”

Mitchell knew this question was coming, but that doesn't make it any easier to answer. “We was. Vance got sick on the way. This was as far west as we made it.”

Isaac stares up at the ceiling. He and Vance were never that close, but with so few of them left, any death is a knife between the ribs. It's why Mitchell never gave Sarah his new address; he couldn't take the endless parade of obituaries. “I'm so sorry, Mitch,” says Isaac.

“Me too,” says Mitchell. He was the vault's most experienced doctor. If anybody should have been able to keep her alive, it was him. “She's buried here, in the graveyard. You can visit her.”

“I will.” Isaac's breathing quickens, and Mitchell realizes his mistake too late. “I was there. These men dragged me there, and they—”

“Easy, now. You're safe here. Those thieves are long gone.”

Isaac reaches up to touch the bandages wrapped around his forehead. “One of them shot me, didn't he? There was a grave. My grave. How did I get here?”

“One of the townsfolk dug you up ‘n brought you here. A fella named Victor. I patched you up best I could.”

“You're still too modest for your own good. How many surgeons could save someone from a point-blank gunshot to the head?”

Mitchell waves it off. “Hold off on singing my praises 'til you know what the damage is.”

“I know I'm alive. Thanks for saving me.”

“Don’t mention it. Thanks for not dying on my operating table.”

“Any time.” Isaac exhales. “Is it a bad sign that I already feel like going back to sleep?”

“Just means your body's working on healing itself. Rest easy.”

Isaac wakes again a few hours later. He remembers their conversation, thank the Lady, and Mitchell crosses out _difficulty forming new long-term memories_ from his mental list of traumatic brain injury symptoms. This time, Isaac stays conscious long enough to eat some brahmin beef casserole from the generous townsfolk. It’s a far cry from what they were raised on, pre-war canned food and hydroponics-grown vegetables. Keeping livestock would’ve been a waste of space and resources. In a sealed vault, no waste was acceptable. “Pace yourself,” Mitch tells Isaac, and Isaac complies, even though he must be starving.

“You said Victor was the one who found me,” says Isaac, when he's done eating. “Did he see anything? Any clues for where they're headed?”

Victor saw two gunshots at point blank range; a man rolling Isaac into a shallow grave with the toe of his boot; shovelful after shovelful of dirt, piling over a limp body. Mitchell didn’t witness it, but he’s pictured it enough times that he feels like he was there. “You're going after 'em?”

“I want answers, and I want my Pip-Boy back.”

“Hell,” says Mitchell. He ain't a man who swears often. “Is that what they was after?”

Isaac gets halfway through shaking his head before he stops, gritting his teeth. Mitchell knows exactly how much med-x he has left. Knows he can’t spare any more for Isaac, no matter how much he wants to. “They wanted a package I was delivering,” says Isaac, when he can speak again. “Some oversized metal casino chip.”

“Sounds like a tourist bauble.”

“That's what I thought, but something made it worth killing for.”

After Mitchell changes Isaac’s bandages, they play Heel. It’s a kids’ game, a getting-to-know-you game, invented by Vault 21's first generation to be born underground. Guess whether the next card drawn will be high or low. Guess right, you get a point; guess wrong, and the other person has to say something about themselves. Correctly calling out a lie nets you two points, but false accusations lose you two. Teaches card-counting and bluffing all at once, two skills as essential as reading or writing.

(Might not be anyone left to play it before long. Mitchell tries not to think about that.)

Used to be the truths and lies were little things: what you had for breakfast, a change in room assignments, the last person you beat at blackjack. Everyone knew the big things about each other. But here, with Isaac, that’s not how things are. Been six years since they saw each other. Life has gone on. Isaac can bluff about places he’s been, things he’s seen, and Mitchell can do the same. Isaac says he’s hiked through Death Valley, and Mitchell loses two points for calling it a lie. Isaac loses two for betting that Mitchell has never treated a Super Mutant.

They’re tied when Mitchell glances at the clock and sees how late it’s getting. “I got to go check on another patient,” he says. “You gonna be alright here for an hour?”

“I’m standing.” That’s a piece of slang Mitchell hasn’t heard in years. Isaac looks down at himself and adds, “Or I hope I’ll be, soon.”

Mitchell snorts — even brain damage can’t excuse that joke — and gets up. As he leaves the clinic, Isaac calls after him, “Thanks again, Mitch. I mean it.”

“Told you not to mention it,” Mitchell calls back.

* * *

Isaac insists on walking the next day. Mitchell stays close by, reminding him to take it slow, that recoveries take time, but Isaac’s steps are steady and careful as he makes a full circuit of the clinic and then another. He only stumbles twice. Doesn’t fall once.

After lunch, he says he feels good enough to go into town. Wants to thank Victor in person and ask around about the men who shot him. Mitchell takes his old vault suit out from the back of his closet, brushes the dust off the old leather. The clothes Isaac was wearing when he came in were ruined by blood and dirt. He’ll need something new to cover up for the locals.

Isaac traces the numbers on the back, his expression halfway between nostalgia and reverence. “I lost mine ages ago.”

“Well, you can have it,” Mitchell says. “Not like I wear it anymore.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me ‘til you see how it fits.”

Isaac puts it on without bothering to slip behind one of the screens. Modesty was never a big concern in a vault built on transparency and with communal showers; it’s nothing Mitchell hasn’t seen before. The suit fits Isaac decent enough, but it hangs off him in places. The Mojave doesn’t have a walk-in diner like the vault did. He inspects himself, seems satisfied with the results. “You said Victor and Trudy are the people I should talk to?”

“If anybody in Goodsprings knows anything, they do. Before I forget— take this, too. If you’re fixing to hunt those men down, a map should come in handy.”

It’s a standard-issue Pip-Boy 3000, still in good condition. Mitchell deleted every scrap of personal information off it on a bad night years ago; got mad at himself for playing Vance’s voice over and over, then took it out on the recording. Couldn’t get none of it back. If anything of Asher is left on Isaac’s own, no wonder he’s so eager to track it down.

“I can’t take that.”

“It's just a loan ‘til you get yours back.” Mitchell would be just as willing to give it away for permanent, but he knows Isaac won’t accept a full replacement. It’s the only way he’ll get the man to take it, other than tying it on Isaac’s arm himself.

Isaac takes the Pip-Boy, thumbs the dust off the screen, fastens it on. For a second, he almost looks like he did the day they all left the vault. “I’ll give this back to you soon,” he promises.

“One more thing. There's... something you oughta know about Victor.” Better for Isaac to find out here than on his own. “He’s not one of House’s, but he’s a Securitron.”

Isaac stares at him, waiting for the punchline. When it doesn’t come, he says, “You’re joking.”

“I'm not. Victor’s a harmless fella, nothing like those police-faced robots. Been here longer than most of the folks in town, me included, 'n we’ve never had no trouble from him.”

“Every last Securitron was designed and manufactured by RobCo. They _all_ belong to him.” Isaac looks like a man who picked up a stick and found it was a snake. Shaken, bitten, and ready to stomp on something's head. “I was supposed to deliver that chip to the Strip gate. They never said it was for—”

“Just hold on, now!” Mitchell walked forty miles to get clear of House’s influence. It can’t be cropping up here like a bad weed; can’t have been here this whole time. Just can’t. “If that chip and Victor was both House’s, why didn't he have Victor stop those thieves right there?”

“Three armed men against one Securitron. Those odds are even at best. And something small like that, fragile… It could be too valuable to risk breaking in a firefight.”

“Say it is. Why's Victor still in town, then, 'stead of trailing 'em?”

“The chip could have a GPS tracker embedded inside. House could be tracking it through satellite images. I've been all over the southwest, and every time I find a RobCo facility, there's a dozen new prototypes that never saw daylight. No one but him knows the deck he's playing.”

“You’re jumping at ghosts, Yitz,” Mitchell says. “You’re still recovering from brain surgery. Give your head some time to clear. I'm telling you, it's all coincidence.”

“I hope you're right.”

The door closes behind Isaac, and for the first time in five days — the longest since Vance died — Mitchell is alone in his house. The emptiness makes the air colder, thinner, harder to force into his lungs. In the vault, there was always somebody within ten feet of you. If they weren’t next to you, they were below you or above you. You got to recognizing footsteps so you could put names to the thumps overhead, and you’d known those names all your life, or else you’d known them all of theirs. There were no strangers. There couldn’t be, with three hundred people sharing three levels. And now Mitchell lives alone on a hill in the biggest house in town, his closest neighbor five hundred feet away.

He has his ways of coping. He turns the radio up as loud as it’ll go (never Radio New Vegas, not after he heard a commercial for the Vault 21 Hotel); he tidies up the clinic; he checks the complex set-up of beakers and tubes he uses to make homemade stimpaks. The trick, he learned years ago, is to keep himself moving and his brain occupied. He's gotten good at filling up the emptiness. Odds are he'll have decades more to practice.

* * *

Isaac returns after sunset, an old rifle slung across his back. Aside from the bandages, he doesn’t look like a man five days removed from his grave.

“Find any leads?” Mitchell asks.

“Enough to go on,” Isaac says. Means he’ll be heading out soon, and Mitchell tries to be glad for him. “I also found a man hiding at the gas station.”

“Don’t get yourself involved in that trouble.”

“I already have.” Isaac doesn’t look a bit sorry. “Sunny and Trudy will be on our side when the Powder Gangers get here.”

Mitchell looks at him like he’s lost his mind, which he might have, on account of the bullets in his brain. “You got shot twice, and now you wanna put yourself in the middle of a firefight.”

“This is your home. People are trying to take it away. Did you think I’d walk off and let that happen?” Isaac doesn’t say, _Losing one home was enough._ He doesn't say, _This time we can fight back._ The hand on Mitchell’s shoulder says it all for him.

“You really reckon you can hold your own against the Powder Gangers?”

“Sunny gave me this—” Isaac turns to show the rifle clearer “—and set up some bottles for me to practice on. I hit nine out of ten from fifty yards. I haven’t been sitting around since I left Shady Sands, Mitch. I know how to look after myself.”

Not enough to keep from getting buried in a shallow grave, Mitchell thinks, but he keeps it to himself. Some words you can’t take back. He tries to wrap his head around the idea of Isaac Levitt, mild-mannered schoolteacher and gunslinging courier. He can’t quite manage it.

Damn it, though, Isaac is right about the Powder Gangers. This fight was gonna happen eventually. “When’s this going down?” Mitchell asks. He won’t be any use in the fight itself, but he can still get ready for the injured that’ll come after.

“Soon. Tomorrow, if I had to put chips on it. They’ll be armed with guns and dynamite. If you have any supplies to spare, it would help.”

There’s no such thing as spare supplies in a place like this. Mitchell knows exactly how many stimpaks he has on hand; how many feet of suture thread; how many cc of med-x. (He had a month’s worth of supplies left when Isaac wound up on his doorstep, and two weeks at best after the surgery was done, but Isaac don’t need to know that.) Three stimpaks is all he can give, plus a bag of field supplies: bandages, tourniquets, rubbing alcohol, two doses of med-x, other things that’ll hopefully keep folks from dying before they can reach the clinic.

They spend the rest of the evening taking turns at dealing blackjack. Two decks, Level Three rules. Even without stakes, it’s too easy to lose track of time like this. The rhythm of the game is like an old song, and Mitchell doesn’t realize how much he missed it until he hears it again.

* * *

Mitchell is a light sleeper without the hum of a generator surrounding him, and he hears Isaac leave at the crack of dawn. He makes his own preparations: sets out the equipment he’ll need in the clinic, sterilizes all of it. The fighting hasn’t started, and he’s already waiting for the aftermath. He has to remind himself to stay away from the windows. He wants to hear what’s going on in town, but a dead doctor won’t do Goodsprings any good.

The first shot rings out around noon. The second comes right on top of it, and the gunfire don’t let up for minutes. There’s the sound of dynamite going off. Once, twice, three times. The chips are down; only thing left is to see where the ball lands.

He gets out his laser pistol, just in case.

The gunfire dies down.

Mitchell reminds himself to breathe.

The door creaks open. As Mitchell reaches for his pistol, Sunny calls from the hallway, “It’s all over, Doc! We sent those gangers running. Got somebody you need to take a look at.”

She and Alice are carrying Dale Sumner, a tourniquet around his left thigh. “He got shot by a Powder Ganger,” Sunny says. “Your friend Isaac pulled him behind a crate ‘n stopped the bleeding.” Dale is out cold, but he’s breathing, and his pulse is good for someone whose femoral artery got grazed by a bullet. Mitchell gets to work.

* * *

There’s one last thing Isaac wants to do, before he leaves town.

They pick up two small stones — the closest to disks they can find — on the way to the graveyard. Bodies were cremated in the vault; not here, out in the wasteland, where space is no issue. When Mitchell was traveling, sometimes it felt like empty space was all the wasteland had. He doesn’t miss traveling, but he does miss traveling with her.

The headstone says Rebecca Weintraub, but nobody called her Rebecca since she was twelve, when she got caught trying to swipe her level rep’s blackjack deck. Folks started calling her and her accomplice Bonnie and Clyde. Isaac, a well-read but not yet tactful nine-year-old, had pointed out that the real Bonnie and Clyde were successful thieves. The vault’s would-be thieves were more like this other pair he’d read about: Vikki and Vance. The names stuck.

Isaac’s own grave sits ten feet away. Neither of them look at it.

Mitchell sets his stone down first. Isaac follows. In the vault, the stones would be chips, and the headstone would be a little engraved plaque in a quiet room on Level Three. Vance’s grandmother always said the tradition was started by her own grandfather’s mother, as a substitute for leaving stones. Now it’s the other way around.

Mitchell says his goodbyes to Vance. Promises to visit again soon.

The walk back is quiet. Insects buzz in the air like little generators; from a ways off, a brahmin lows. A merciful October breeze rustles the shrubs and yucca plants. Would never be able to tell there was a shootout here yesterday, except for the bloodstains in the dirt by the saloon. Mitchell climbs the first two steps to his door before he realizes that Isaac isn’t following him up. He turns around. Knows what Isaac is going to say before he says it.

“I need to find those men,” Isaac says. “They have too much of a head start already.”

“Good luck. Hope you turn ‘em up ten-and-ace.”

Isaac pulls him into a hug. “It was good to see you again. I didn’t think I ever would.”

“Only took you almost getting killed,” Mitchell says, tightening the hug. Isaac is warm and alive. Luck laughs at prayers, but Mitchell still asks her to let Isaac to stay that way. He pulls back, looks Isaac in the eye. “Try not to get shot anymore.”

Isaac laughs, a wet little sound. “I’ll try. No promises.”

“Come back here if you need patching up.”

“I will.”

Mitchell doesn’t let himself watch the road. He goes inside his empty home, turns the radio up to fill the quiet. There’s still two decks worth of cards sitting out on the kitchen table. He sorts them out, shuffles each deck a few times, and puts them away in a dusty little drawer. They'll stay there until Isaac comes back. He still needs to return that Pip-Boy.


End file.
